Emil Cioran (1911 – 1995)
Romanian writer, noted for his somber works in the French language; known in French as Émile Cioran.
We must live, you used to say, as if we were never going to die. - Didn't you know that's how everyone lives, including those obsessed with Death?
To detach yourself elegantly from the world; to give contour and grace to sadness; a solitude in style; a walk that gives cadence to memories; stepping towards the intangible; with the breath in the trembling margins of things; the past reborn in the overflow of fragrances; the smell, through which we conquer time; the contour of the invisible things; the forms of the immaterial; to deepen yourself in the intangible; to touch the world airborne by smell; aerial dialogue and gliding dissolution; to bathe in your own reflecting fragmentation…
Years and years to waken from that sleep in which the others loll; then years and years to escape that awakening...
Life is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.
If someone incessantly drops the word "life," you know he's a sick man.
Never unreal, Pain is a challenge to the universal fiction. What luck to be the only sensation granted a content, if not a meaning!
The mind that puts everything in question, reaches, after a thousand interrogations, an almost total inertia, a situation which the inert, in fact, knows from the start, by instinct. For what is inertia but a congenital perplexity?
Utopia is a mixture of childish rationalism and secularized angelism.
Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?
One cannot live without motives. I have no motives left, and I am living.
Consciousness is nature's nightmare.
No one should try to live if he has not completed his training as a victim.
To Live signifies to believe and hope — to lie and to lie to oneself.
"Neither this world, nor the next, nor happiness are for the being abandoned to doubt." - This point in the Gita is my death sentence.
Why does the Gita rank "renunciation of the fruit of actions" so high? Because such renunciation is rare, impracticable, contrary to our nature, and because achieving it is destroying the man one has been and one is, killing in oneself the entire past, the work of millennia - in a word, freeing oneself of the Species, that hideous and immemorial riffraff.
A distant enemy is always preferable to one at the gate.
In a republic, that paradise of debility, the politician is a petty tyrant who obeys the laws.
A great step forward was made the day men understood that in order to torment one another more efficiently they would have to gather together, to organize themselves into a society.
"Do I look like someone who has something to do here on Earth?" - That's what I'd like to answer the busybodies who inquire into my activities.